During the past few years online privacy has emerged as a trending topic that has raised remarkable concern amongst online users. Until recently, many users have sincerely believed that the interaction on the internet was taking place under full anonymity.
Now, the web (World Wide Web, WWW) users are finally becoming aware of the fact that a myriad of various entities, e.g. advertising companies, are more or less secretly, or ‘behind the curtains’, following their internet behavior including web ‘surfing’ and also gathering related personal information whenever possible. As marketing clutter has, on the other hand, made traditional ‘broadcast’ type generic marketing in many cases rather ineffective, more sophisticated tracing of user interests and habits has been considered necessary for catching the suitable audience for better targeted ads or other, optionally commercial, information.
Indeed, numerous web sites have been adapted to track visitors through different online tracking technologies, such as web bugs and cookies, which are able to trace, store and forward information about the users' online activity such as visited pages and performed ‘clicks’ or other actions. And not only the operating party behind the web site visited, but also third party entities have implemented more general tracking technologies for gathering private and often sensitive information about the users visiting the web sites that have been supplied with user tracking means. Such information, which may even contain name, address data, e-mail, browsing history, search terms/results etc., may be then ruthlessly capitalized for different marketing purposes, such as provision of targeted advertising, including unsolicited e-mails, also known as ‘spamming’, and e.g. various pop-up or web page—integrated but dynamically changing ads, which the users often consider annoying.
As a countermeasure, this situation has led to the development of different kinds of ad-blockers, i.e. content filtering (software) tools. Nevertheless, the problem with most ad-blockers is that the user, simply by activating the ad-block functionality, basically prevents all the present tracking means from gathering information, whereupon even the companies that may really attract and benefit the user are not able to targetedly approach the user anymore. As a potential further feature though, the user might be enabled to choose which tracking means are allowed to obtain data through the user interface of the particular ad-block application in use, but then again, the user may need to know which company is using which tracking means and at the same time many tracking means may be used simultaneously by several companies and the user may not want to share information with all of them, whereupon the such manual tailoring turns out easily extremely challenging or practically impossible at least with currently available tools. Additionally, many users just don't feel comfortable with sharing any private information, but still want to interact with different service providers.